Known as the Batagaika crater, about 1 kilometer long, 86 meters deep, and still growing at the rate of 10 – 30 meters year, has raised tons of questions in the minds of locals in Siberia as well as around the world. People have been calling it as “doorway to the underworld”, “doorway to hell”.
The team of researchers at the University of Sussex have so far found that it is buried fossilized forests, extinct animals and about 200,000 years of climatic changes. This crater is also known as “thermokarst” which is named after an unrelated erosional formation found in limestone. Such structure is formed when the top layer of the soil is exposed for a continuous period of sub-zero temperatures along with thawing out unevenly. As the result of continuous refreezing and rethawing creates depressions in the area which causes it to become deeper and wide.
This “doorway to hell” has been growing since the 1960s and its growth is rising continuously. For more check out the video.
